The rain we received on Saturday night was needed but wish it could have held off through the weekend and now today you can barley stand up outside it is so windy. The golf course is really in pretty good shape. We are starting to mow or roll the greens daily now.
We saw a great green up this March and now the greens are not nearly as green, this is a normal process with the type of grass on the greens once the weather warms the color will be back. I do not like to apply extra fertilizers in the spring to promote excess growth which I feel slows the root growth at this time of the year and would most likely favor poa annua since this grass does grow very well in the cool weather that we have been having lately. I will be applying some supplemental iron and manganese this week to help control the disease take-all patch and provide a good foundation for the plant to start the growing season.
Last Friday, I sent out 6 guys and spent 5 hours raking every bunker to the best I have seen them all year. The crew did a outstanding job. By Sunday, just about every single rake was in the wrong spot in just about every single bunker. It's one thing to rake bunkers to make them nice a fresh and uniform but having to go out and redo bunker and replace the rakes is upsetting to me as well as the staff why this can not be done by the golfers. We have 64 bunkers here and honestly could have taken at least 40 pictures of rakes being tossed in every direction. Please help us out by placing the rakes in the proper spot and raking the bunker smooth. The amount of extra work on the staff would be greatly reduced and the golf course would look so much better then what we see in these pictures. It just does not seem fair to the other golfers behind these players to have to hunt for rakes or if their ball were to land in a footprint like the middle picture.
We saw a great green up this March and now the greens are not nearly as green, this is a normal process with the type of grass on the greens once the weather warms the color will be back. I do not like to apply extra fertilizers in the spring to promote excess growth which I feel slows the root growth at this time of the year and would most likely favor poa annua since this grass does grow very well in the cool weather that we have been having lately. I will be applying some supplemental iron and manganese this week to help control the disease take-all patch and provide a good foundation for the plant to start the growing season.
The tees have been mowed but due to the 100% sand base the ground temperature pretty much dictates top growth and once the weather turned more back to normal the tees basically stopped growing and only need mowed once per week. The fairways and roughs on the other are growing very well and being mowed on a much more regular basis. I am sure that you have noticed that the rough is quite dense right now.
Last week we really made some nice progress. We are checking sand depths in the bunkers and adding sand when needed while we are adding the sand these bunkers are being edged. We are also working on leveling, moving and/or adding a few irrigation heads to some key areas that have lacking covered. We are trying to limit any irrigation to the new fescue areas. The existing irrigation design is based on overlapping coverage to achieve the best coverage. We have lost some of this which is putting some stress in a few key areas. We are moving these heads to achieve the coverage we need. While trying to lower the water use we are starting to see some of these areas develop over time. Then we look into trying to solve as to why and in most cases its all about water or lack of proper coverage.
Speaking of irrigation last week one of our small pumps that maintain pressure within the irrigation system broke down and needed to be replaced. The pump had well over 6000 hours and was 12 years old.
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| proper placement |
Last Friday, I sent out 6 guys and spent 5 hours raking every bunker to the best I have seen them all year. The crew did a outstanding job. By Sunday, just about every single rake was in the wrong spot in just about every single bunker. It's one thing to rake bunkers to make them nice a fresh and uniform but having to go out and redo bunker and replace the rakes is upsetting to me as well as the staff why this can not be done by the golfers. We have 64 bunkers here and honestly could have taken at least 40 pictures of rakes being tossed in every direction. Please help us out by placing the rakes in the proper spot and raking the bunker smooth. The amount of extra work on the staff would be greatly reduced and the golf course would look so much better then what we see in these pictures. It just does not seem fair to the other golfers behind these players to have to hunt for rakes or if their ball were to land in a footprint like the middle picture. 